Slow down and save a life

Your first glimpse is of something in the middle of the road. Brown and curled up. Lifeless. Driving past, you realize it is a fox. Hit by a vehicle and left lying on a white line grave.

The number of foxes, both cub and adult, killed on our roads each year is perhaps beyond calculation. Wildlife deaths on Irish roads are never going to be recorded in the annual report of road traffic accidents.

Not for creatures will be erected roadside accident markers bedecked with annual flowers.

In an expression of gallows humour, foxes killed by vehicular traffic are perhaps the lucky ones. Death hopefully comes in an instant as moving metal meets fur. Thus, a fox is spared living a life in the countryside where fox hunters set out to harass and kill it using every trick in the hunter’s vulpicide manual.

It is a tough world out there for foxes. Made tougher by the fact that under existing Irish wild

life legislation the fox is a non-protected species. A target species for a somewhat miserably inadequate group of deeply malevolent fox hunters.

Through a prism of a hatred of foxes by a minority in this country, this animal can be shot, snared, dugout to be thrown alive to packs of dogs, clubbed to death, chased to exhaustion and poisoned.

By what universal law can it be decreed that death by vehicle spares the animal ending its vulpine life at the hands of a fox hunter getting an atom-vibrating thrill at inflicting pain and death in the pursuit of entertainment.

A fox lying dead on a road might not merit a driver’s glance. But that is part of our natural heritage lying there. An upward tilt of the right foot is an action that will reduce the carnage on our roads for wildlife and humans.

Yours, John Tierney, Campaigns Director, Association of Hunt Saboteurs, PO Box 4734, Dublin 1.